So after a long painful journey tonight of trying to serialize a function pointer, I began to wonder. After seeing the code with a bunch of reinterpret_cast() calls, I got to wondering -- how does ...

These pointers weren't declared as raw, C-styled ones, but as shared_ptr to my_class. Shared_ptr is a generic class (known as template class in C++) which models a traditional pointer by exposing the ...

If you mean to ask if pointers and references are used only to avoid the performance cost of making that copy, no. Sometimes using a pointer or reference is done just to avoid the performance ...